The Place Beyond the Pines

We can get one thing out of the way: the title refers
to Schenectady, New York. The city's name, according
to Wikipedia,

…is derived loosely from a Mohawk word for "on that side of the
pinery,"
or "near the pines," or "place beyond the pine plains."

So there you go. If you watch this movie, you won't have to wonder
about that, like I did.

The movie is an epic, played out over the span of 15 years or so.
But it begins when Luke (Ryan Gosling),
a carny motorcycle stunt driver,
becomes
aware that he's the father of one-year-old Jason. Jason's mother, Romina
(Eva Mendes), is trying to raise the boy with the help of
current boyfriend Kofi and her mother.

Luke tries to do the "right thing". He quits the
carny and its nomadic ways, and tries to settle down with an
honest job. But (surprisingly enough) his motorcycle stunt
skills do not translate smoothly into the mainstream
Schenectady job market. So (ironically, I guess) he tries
Career Plan B: professional Schenectady bank robber.

Unsurprisingly, this does not go well. Luke's clumsy efforts to horn
in on the increasingly stable domesticity of Kofi and Romina
go sour. His partner in crime gets cold feet, and their relationship
goes south too. Eventually,… well, no spoilers here, but
the other male star in this movie is Bradley Cooper, and
when he shows up, playing a beat cop, the movie takes an
unexpected (for me) turn.

The movie is noirish, skillfully acted and executed. Not for those
looking for tales of redemption and triumph, though.

Trance

Well over four years ago, Pun Salad opined:
"I'm not a violent person, but there's something about James McAvoy that
makes me want to give him a good slap." Guess what? McAvoy gets slapped
around, and much worse, in this movie. It's almost a feelgood romp
for me.

In Trance, McAvoy plays art auctioneer Simon. His company is
auctioning off Goya's Witches in the Air (which is an actual
famous
painting), when a well-planned heist springs into operation.
Simon attempts to execute the standard plan: grab the most
valuable thing being auctioned (the Goya in this case), and get it to a
chute which will whoosh it into a secure time-locked safe.
But the head crook (Vincent Cassel), confronts Simon
before that happens.

But then … something happens. It's not clear what. But nobody
knows the fate of the painting. The bad guys don't
have it. The good guys don't either. Simon has suffered
a serious head injury (yay!), and he doesn't remember what he did.

Soon, Simon (after more physical abuse)
is off to beautiful Elizabeth, a hypnotherapist,
in hopes that her hypnoskills will allow the painting to be
located. What happens instead: a twisty web of betrayal, violence,
sex,
and unexpected revelations.

V is for Vengeance

Anyway: this book has a short prologue where a cocky, albeit stupid,
young man goes to a loan shark to finance a Vegas gambling trip. Things
do not work out well for him, and he gets tossed off the roof
of a parking garage.

Fast forward to "today" (Where "today" is 1988.) Kinsey's in a
department
store and notices something the store cops don't: two women are
busy shoplifting expensive stuff. She alerts security. One woman
is apprehended, the other escapes, but not before nearly running
over Kinsey in her Mercedes.

Normally, that would finish things for Kinsey. But once the captured
shoplifter makes bail, she is found deceased, having apparently
jumped from a tall bridge. Or was she, like the doofus in the prologue,
tossed off? I know which way I'd bet. Her ex-boyfriend hires
Kinsey to investigate. Soon she's up against the loan shark and
a hostile cop.

Kind of a below-average outing, the characters Kinsey meets
aren't very sympathetic or interesting,
but that's OK.

Oblivion

OK, so Tom Cruise may have some wacky religious beliefs.
OK, so he's had some problems maintaining a stable marriage.
OK, so he turned Mission Impossible from a cat-and-mouse
espionage thriller into yet another big dumb action franchise.
OK, so he's not tall enough to play Jack Reacher. Quibbles aside, the
guy chooses some pretty good movies, ones that probably wouldn't
have gotten made without his star power behind them.

Here he plays Jack Harper, living in a remote tower high above a ruined Earth,
with his lover/co-worker Vika. His job is to fix drones, which prowl
the surface looking for "Scavs". The Scavs are the remaining aliens from
the Earth-destroying war; they are trying
to sabotage the terraforming of Titan, which requires most of
Earth's water to be sucked up and transported off-world.

Or at least that's what Jack thinks is going on.
That's not what's
going on at all. It takes most of the rest of the movie to unwind
the actual situation.
(His and Vika's relevant memories
have been
wiped, so there's a clue right there.)

The true situation is revealed in such a way that it sort of makes
sense, but I had a hard time trying to figure out the reasons for
the deception. Maybe I missed something. Otherwise, it's got something
for everyone: a twisty plot you have to actually think about, amazing
special effects, intense action, romance, sacrifice... Good job, Tom.

Oz The Great and Powerful

It's kind of a neat idea: a prequel to The Wizard of Oz,
showing how the Wizard made his way to the enchanted
land. (A remake of the original would be kind of sacreligious,
I guess. Millions of Judy Garland fans would bitch and moan
about whoever played Dorothy, for one thing.)

James Franco plays the future Wizard. His humble beginnings
are as a Kansan carnival magician/con artist, and his highest
ambitions are to make some semi-dishonest cash and
have his (PG-rated) way with a lot of women. (As in the original, these
real-world scenes are monochrome; they're also in 4:3 aspect
ratio.)

An outraged husband causes Oz to (literally) take flight in
a handy circus balloon: a good plan until he runs into the
inevitable Kansas tornado, which whisks him to Oz, where things
are colorful and widescreen. There he meets
the good and evil witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams);
he has a hard time telling which
are which, though. He also picks up a couple of travelling companions:
China Girl (a talking doll) and Finley (a flying monkey, but a nice one).
An epic struggle develops between the forces of good and evil
over control of the Emerald City.

The movie is directed by the great and powerful Sam Raimi, so it's
not bad. It was a 3-D production in the theatres, and there are
a lot of visual gags that came off flat (heh) on my exceedingly
normal
home TV. There are a number of clever homages to the original
movie, but intellectual
property rights apparently limited the links that could have been made.
(No Scarecrow, Tin Man, or Cowardly Lion backstories, sorry.)

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

A recommendation from my lovely and literate daughter, available
at the library of the University Near Here.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is sort of a geek mystery.
The protagonist, Clay Jannon, is unemployed in the Bay Area when the
book opens. He was working as a web designer for
the bright startup company, NewBagel, an effort by ex-Googlers
who "wrote software to design and bake the platonic bagel: smooth
crunchy skin, soft doughy interior, all in a perfect circle."
Unfortunately, the market yawned, the ex-Googlers soon did too,
and Clay started looking for work.

He happens upon the unlikely shop in the title. He is taken
on as the store's second employee: Clay, Mr. Penumbra, and
the other guy work 8-hour shifts, every day. The store
has a smattering of normal books, but it soon becomes clear
that the real purpose of the store involves the volumes on
the impossibly tall shelves, a library from which a series of oddball
customers return and check out volumes every so often.

Clay's curiosity gets the best of him; against the rules, he
starts trying to make sense out of the special tomes.
This turns out to be a life-changing quest, involving
Clay's friends. (One of whom has made a small fortune
with CGI software to realistically render the female bosom;
he is, Clay confides, "the world's leading expert on boob physics.")
We are very soon confronted with a mysterious worldwide cult/corporation,
which operates in the nexus between typography, cryptography,
and immortality.

The book is unusually technically accurate on some geeky details.
For example, Clay is a whiz Web programmer, and his language of
choice is "Ruby". Which (yes) is an actual thing commonly
used for Web development.

It's a lot of fun, and (for UNHers) I've returned the library's
copy, so you can snap it up.

Would that make Hanauer and Liu the New McCarthyites?

Gillespie, of course, does a fine takedown, pointing out how
fact-challenged and generally awful the Hanauer/Liu effort is.
The effort to link libertarianism with the blood-soaked
history
of Communism would be despicable if it weren't so transparently
bogus.

But: Hanauer and Liu. Haven't I seen those names before?

Oh, right! Back in 2008,
they wrote a book called (honest) The True Patriot, and advertised it
in (of all places) National Review. (A bold move, but I guess
NR was happy enough to take their money.) It was a progressive
effort to
co-opt the "patriotism" label away from … well, patriots. And, operating
under the delusion that their policies were "patriotic", they didn't
waste a minute in drawing the logical conclusion that anyone who
disagreed was "unpatriotic". It was an admitted effort to slap together
a "civic religion" around progressivism. But they only managed to
implement
the worst stereotypes of religiosity correctly:
the smug, self-satisfied imagined
righteousness of the True Believers; the shrill
finger-pointing damnation unleashed
upon the heretics who dare dissent from the Holy Writ.

Pun Salad looked at The True Patriot and its shoddy reasoning
back in 2008.

But the funny part is the five-year-old ad, which I downloaded and
saved here.
Here are three of their rhetorical questions meant to question the
patriotism of the "far right". (By which, of course, they meant
conservative Republicans and the then-current Bush Administration.)

IS IT PATRIOTIC
— or even conservative — to support an aggressive expansion
of government power to eavesdrop?

IS IT PATRIOTIC
— or even conservative — to support tax and fiscal policies
that let the wealthiest off the hook, put more burdens on the middle
class, and
create a massive debt and deficit for the next generation to clean up?

IS IT PATRIOTIC
— or even conservative — to throw America’s great military
into wars and nation-building adventures that have flimsy justification
and no
definable end?

Now, I ask you, five years later: given this, this, and this,
were Liu and Hanauer presciently questioning
Barack Obama's patriotism?

I echo Gillespie's conclusion: if Liu and Hanauer exemplify the best
arguments
that libertarian critics can come up with, there's every reason
to be optimistic about the prospects for liberty.

42

This is the second baseball movie we've watched in less than a month,
and the second in a row dealing with the racial bigotry
of decades past. Occasionally the Lords of Netflix deal out the DVDs
that way.

As you probably know, it's a Jackie Robinson biopic, concentrating
on the late 1940s when Brooklyn Dodgers owner, Branch Rickey, brought
him out of the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs into the Dodger
organization. Rickey was looking not just for baseball talent,
but for a thick skin: knowing that the first black player would
endure humiliation and abuse, he needed someone who would endure
it, and prevail over it.

And that's pretty much what happened. The script leans toward
hagiography, but that's excusable. Solid acting throughout and
a very authentic 1940s atmosphere. (Whoa: there's Ebbets Field.)

Relatively obscure actors play Jackie (Chadwick Boseman) and his
wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie). Harrison Ford plays Branch Rickey,
and it's OK with me if he gets an Oscar for it. A lot of
hey-isn't-that roles: Christopher Meloni as Leo Durocher, Alan Tudyk as
a nasty bigoted manager, Hamish Linklater as teammate Ralph Branca,
John C. McGinley as announcer Red Barber. Best of all: Max Gail
as Burt Shotton; although IMDB shows that he's
had an active career, I don't think I've seen him
in anything since he played Detective Wojciehowicz
on Barney Miller way back when.

The Sapphires

This is a nice Australian movie, some serious stuff, a considerable
about of funny stuff. The broad plot is standard: "disadvantaged but
talented kids succeed by pluck and perseverance." But it's
different enough that it kept me interested and even involved.

Things start in 1960's Australia, where the aboriginal population
is still widely discriminated against; if anything, it might be
worse than the bad old segregated USA. A group of aboriginal girl singers
crash a white-only talent contest; they're clearly better than anyone
else, singing Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again".
But the bigoted judges let a white kid win instead.

This outrages
Dave, who's been hired as the Master of Ceremonies. He, like many
Australians, is a drunken loser, but he knows talent. He offers
to take over as the girls' manager. He demands that they
stop doing their beloved country music, and start doing Motown soul.
He changes their group's name to "The Sapphires".
And before you know it, he and the kids are off to Vietnam, where
they are to entertain American troops. What could go wrong?
There is, of course, internal bickering and conflict. And it's Vietnam,
so: boom.

There is social commentary, but it's not too heavy-handed.
It's (very loosely) based on an actual group; Wikipedia
has the details. (The article also notes that the DVD cover
prominently features the Dave character over the girls—see above—and people
got kind of upset about that.)

Where had I seen the actor playing Dave before? Oh, yeah: playing
Kristen Wiig's cop sorta-boyfriend in Bridesmaids.

Masquerade

A nice epic historical drama, of the
sort that Asians (in this case, South Koreans)
seem to do so much better than we do.
If you're up to reading subtitles for over two
hours, and aren't averse to sorting out characters
where everyone (sorry) kinda looks alike,
check it out.

It's set in 17th-century Korea; the King, Gwang-hae, has
a fine line to tread between contentious factions in his
own country and the superior military power of China
and Japan. He's extremely (and, it turns out, justifiably)
paranoid about his personal safety.

Which leads him to assign his trusted advisors with a desperate
task: to find a reasonable double, who can take his place in
risky situations (like dinner, where the food could be poisoned).
They find Ha-seon, a bawdy song-and-dance man employed at the
local whorehouse.
He's an obvious physical double, but
nearly a polar opposite from the King in every other way:
cowardly, impulsive, and, uh, not that smart.

But he gets hired, of course. (It helps that Ha-Seon doesn't
really grasp what he's getting into, or his likely fate.)
And there are some really funny bits as he gamely attempts
to act royally.

But he grows in the role. When the King is mysteriously taken ill,
everyone has no choice but to make the best of the situation.
Surprising everyone, most of all himself, Ha-seon finds himself
righting wrongs, fighting injustice, standing up for the nation:
things that the King himself had failed to do. Which, of course,
puts him in more danger.

Cinnamon Skin

One of my reading projects is near the end. Cinnamon Skin is
the penultimate novel in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series.
I see the books are in the process of being reissued in paperback, with an
introduction by Lee Child. And truly, I see some similarities between
Child's hero Jack Reacher and Travis.

In the previous book, Travis's economist
sidekick Meyer was deeply traumatized
in the final showdown with the villain. He's still under a dark
cloud here, morosely schlepping up to Canada to give a lecture series.
But things get worse: Meyer lends his yacht, the John Maynard
Keynes, to his newlywed niece,
Norma and her husband Evan. Headed out from the slip to do some fishing, the
Keynes blows up, obliterating all souls aboard. Soon afterward,
a terrorist group takes credit for the bomb, revenge for Meyer's
giving advice to Chile's dictatorship years previous.

So inept terrorists miss their target, killing some unintended victims
instead. A neat story, but some little things about it nag Travis.
Eventually he and Meyer get a bead on the actual baddie, trying
to get on his elusive, murderous, trail. This takes them here and there: Texas,
upstate New York, finally down to Mayan ruins near Cancún. Suspense
builds, and there
is a thrilling and satisfying climax.

Along the way, MacDonald expertly paints the locales and people
they meet. Even minor characters come alive as actual people.
Jeez, I miss him.

It's short: my book club hardcover from the mid-80s is slightly over 200 pages.
Today's publishing contracts demand more, I think. But not better.

Hey, just a thought: Carl Hiaasen's next book should be titled
Cinnamon Skink, in tribute to John D. Whattya think?

Carol Shea-Porter: If the Car Won't Start, Maybe Slashing the Tires Would Help

It's been a long
time (mid-June) since
we last looked at one of "Carol's Column's",
penned by my own CongressCritter and perpetual toothache,
Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH01). Her 700-800 word theses are primarily aimed
at the op-ed pages of our local newspapers, but
also appear at her government-provided
website.

Her mid-June column was about student loans.
On July 1,
she emitted another column on the same topic, where she managed
to say precisely nothing new or interesting: just the same tired
finger-pointing, lame talking points, scare tactics, and sloganeering.
Not worth a response.

On August
6 her column bemoaned Congressional gridlock. As if that's a bad
thing. Nevertheless, she and her colleagues were blameless; it was
all the Republicans' fault, especially those awful "Tea Party" Republicans.
At least Carol believes in transparent government: her column
was transparently partisan. Also not worth refuting at length
here, but even my local
paper, Foster's Daily Democrat considered it to be a case of "Kettle
calls the pot black"

But it's time for Pun Salad to get back in the saddle.
Carol's current
column is titled
Time
for a Jump Start (hence our clever illustration);
As always: I am reproducing her entire column here, lest I be
accused of quoting out of context.
Carol's words are (appropriately) on the left with a lovely
#EEFFFF background color; my comments are on the right.

Our economy has been slowly but steadily recovering. However, too many
people still cannot find work, and most workers are experiencing flat
wages, even though corporate profits are at an all time high. They watch
the stock market and corporate pay and bonuses skyrocketing, and feel
left behind. They believe government and media don't care and are not
even noticing. Are they right?

Carol brushes against an insight here, but her ideology won't allow
her to look at it squarely. Simply put: a lot of domestic firms have
discovered that they can chug along just fine with fewer workers, and
not giving significant raises to the ones left over.

Carol wants you to know that she "cares" about this, of course.
She "cares" quite a bit about any issue that allows her
to rail against her usual array of villains: Republicans,
corporations, the private economy.

But actually caring about citizens who can't find jobs?
Eh, not so much.

They are correct that they are being left behind, but they are not the
only ones noticing and talking about it. Just a few short years ago,
when some economists, politicians, and advocates first started talking
about how the economy seemed to favor only the corporations and the
wealthiest, they were attacked and accused of conducting class warfare.
However, now all of the mainstream newspapers and economic observers are
talking about it also. The American Dream is in danger.

Note Carol's word choice here. The (saintly) folks
on her side are merely "noticing" and "talking about"
the issue. The (nasty) other side "attacked and accused". They're
probably racist Tea Partiers.

But her memory is just convenient. In fact, leftist demagogues
have yammered about this stuff forever, and managed to get
plenty of "mainstream" media outlets to take them seriously
all along.

For decades, each generation has done better than the one before.
Better education and pay resulted in a higher standard of living. This
formula spurred innovation, economic growth, and more millionaires, as
Americans reached for their piece of the dream. Work hard, dream big,
succeed. But lately, that formula is unreliable. Our economy is 70%
consumer driven, so it relies on more Americans earning more money, but
with wages flat, workers have not been able to drive the economy like
before. This is a problem for all of us. USA Today's May 5, 2013
article, "Profits don't flow through to wages", quotes Mark Zandi, chief
economist of Moody's Analytics: "Ultimately, for the economy to thrive
we need everyone participating." This article reports that, "Workers who
rely on paychecks for their income have been running in place,
financially speaking. Adjusting for inflation, an average worker who was
paid $49,650 at the end of 2009 is making about $545 less now—and that's
before taxes and deductions."

The USA Today article Carol references is here.
The authors, Paul Davidson and John Waggoner, are slightly less
clueless than Carol about the issue. But they, like Carol, Point With
Alarm to the disconnect between rising stock prices/corporate
profitability, and employee compensation as if there is—nay, should
be—some sort of mathematically necessary correlation between them.

But there's not. Few employers are in the charity business. If it makes
economic sense to hire more workers, or to give their existing workers
significant raises, they will. Otherwise they won't.

There are things government can do about this. The most effective
strategy
would involve a search-and-destroy mission
against existing government disincentives
to employment. Like, for example, Obamacare. Unfortunately,
Carol strongly approves of those disincentives.

It doesn't matter: she can continue to Point With Alarm, which
is all she really wants to do anyway.

CNN Money covered this story in 2011, titling it, "How the middle class
became the under class." They wrote, "Middle-class incomes have been
stagnant for at least a generation, while the wealthiest tier has surged
ahead at lightning speed." They added, "Meanwhile, the richest 1% of
Americans—those making $380,000 or more—have seen their incomes grow 33%
over the last 20 years, leaving average Americans in the dust." CNN
Money cites the reasons other articles cite as well—globalization of the
economy, technology, erosion of unions and collective bargaining, etc.
It also reports that, "Tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration
and extended under Obama were also a major windfall for the nation's
richest."

The CNN Money story referenced by Carol is here,
written by one Annalyn Censky. Even though it's 2.5 years old, it's
more up Carol's alley, a complete array of left-wing talking
points and uncritical quotes from obvious partisans.

Again: Carol's more interested in stirring the demagogic pot than
in actually doing anything to spur employment and wages.

An International Business Times article, “US Worker Productivity Is
Rising Faster Than Wage Growth,” says it all. They wrote, "U.S.
companies have been getting more out of fewer employees, but those
workers aren't enjoying a corresponding increase in their wages." They
also quoted Gary Burtless, senior fellow in economic studies at The
Brookings Institute, who told CNN, "A bigger share of what businesses in
the U.S. are producing is going to the owners of the firms and the
people who lent money to the firm, and a smaller share is going to
workers."

Referenced article is here.
Again, the question-begging premise is that productivity "should be"
inexorably tied to wage levels and employment.

Why assume that? Well, it allows Carol and her ilk to dodge around
why that disconnect might be happening. It's much more politically useful
to implicitly or explicitly point the finger at rich, greedy
capitalists. Essentially: "you're doing poorly because they
are doing better."

For example…

These are not left-wing organizations. These are middle to conservative
groups who are highlighting a problem in America—the vanishing middle
class. When a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) earns 380 times what the
average worker earns, when a CEO earns in one hour what the employee
earns in one month, something is wrong, and we need to work on this.

My suggestion would be for Carol to get out of politics and
start up her own enlightened corporation. One where the CEO/worker
pay disparity will be less than 380. Obviously, that's
the road to business success!

Won't happen, though. Carol's complete economic illiteracy would
shatter on any contact with the free market. In politics, however,
you can
make a very decent living out of that ignorance.

But about that "vanishing middle class":
2013 is the 100th anniversary of the book The Facts
of Socialism, by socialist Jessie Wallace
Hughan. In it (page
88) she refers to the "vanishing middle class" as if it were a done
deal, a known fact, an inevitable outcome.

For lefties, the American middle class has been vanishing for a real
long time. It's a completely immortal trope, even though the middle
class stubbornly refuses to vanish.

We need to examine trade agreements, end unfair tax breaks, and fix what
conservative Oklahoma Senator Coburn wrote about in his report,
“Subsidies of the Rich and Famous.” We must raise the minimum wage to
provide more buying power for individuals, which will also help small
businesses. We could lower the corporate tax rate, which is merely a
suggestion anyway, since so few corporations actually pay at that rate,
but then we need to actually collect those taxes. CNN Money reported on
August 12, 2008, that nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies paid zero
federal income taxes, and that outrage continues today. Encourage and
reward corporations that create jobs here instead of parking their
profits off shore. Invest in our nation's aging infrastructure. We need
to work together—small businesses and large ones, every level of
government, educational institutions and non-profits—to turn this
around.

Finally, Carol handwaves at various things that government could
do. But they mostly illustrate how idea-free the current crop
of Democrats are. It's a laundry list
of stuff they've been advocating for years
and years. Nothing she proposes will credibly incentivize
the private economy to improve the employment picture.

"Examine trade agreements" is (probably) code for
"erecting trade barriers". In theory, this might make
employment better for a favored fraction; in practice
it would make us all poorer.

I love Senator Coburn. The report Carol mentions is here
(PDF). While it's full of good ideas, there are no recommendations
in there that would directly help employment or wages.

Of course, raising the minimum wage is a disincentive
to hiring and will (again) make
us all poorer.

Carol proposes to do something about corporate taxation, but there's
only a vague muddle instead of concrete proposals. Punish some, reward
others?
Our current labyrinthine corporate tax code is the result of doing
just that for decades.
Will anything Carol's proposing cause businesses
to turn around and hire more people or increase wages? Um, no.
Probably the opposite.

Bemoaning "aging infrastructure" is the latest incarnation of
Obama's "shovel-ready projects". As always, Carol has complete
faith in the power of government to invest money more wisely
than the private market. This faith is immune to evidence or
reason.

I do not have all the answers. Nobody does. But I know fairness is at
our core, and we need to restore this truly American value.

In fact, Carol has no credible answers. As our headline
indicates: to "jump start" the economy, she'd start by slashing
the tires.

Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.

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